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Can a Mayor Be Too Honest?

Remember 2008? Whatever it was like where you live, trust me, it was even headier in Philadelphia. The Phillies, the biggest losers not only in baseball but in professional sports, won the World Series. We danced in the streets that day—past red, white and blue images of presidential candidate Barack Obama adorning barber shops and fixed-gear bikes around town. When he cinched the election the next month, we danced in the streets again.

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Perhaps nothing inspired more hope in city residents around that time, though, than a wonkish, Wharton-educated, bespectacled 51-year-old named Michael Nutter. A year earlier, the reform Democrat had gone from underdog in the race to be Philadelphia’s next mayor to clobbering a slate of usual suspects in the May primary, including a millionaire, the boss of the city’s Democratic Party, a West Philly congressman and a powerful state representative.

Nutter did it by promising to be the exact opposite of then-Democratic Mayor John Street, whose office had been bugged by the FBI, which suspected that his administration was steering city contracts to campaign contributors. Street was never charged with a crime, but the people around him—his city treasurer, his former law partner and several other allies—dropped like flies when widespread pay-to-play came to light. The whole ordeal left the city feeling like it needed a shower.

Like Street, Nutter was a former city councilman; but unlike Street, he was seen as far and away the least tainted member on Council. During his 14-year tenure, Nutter had helped push through anti-pay-to-play legislation, campaign finance reform and the formal establishment of an ethics board—no small tasks in a town that muckraker Lincoln Steffens, at the turn of the 20th century, famously called “corrupt and contented.”

When Hannah Miller, a 30-year-old city resident, described her supercharged dreams about Nutter to a Philadelphia Magazine reporter a few months before his May 2007 primary win, she spoke for many: “Michael is the person who will choose to do the right thing, no matter what the circumstances are.” He also had smart ideas about how to fix schools, fight crime and create the jobs desperately needed in a city once known as the “Workshop of the World” but that had, over the last few decades, shed hundreds of thousands of positions.

I swear, it didn’t all sound so crazy back then.

By the time the general election rolled around, in November 2007, not even the GOP could contain that it, too, had high hopes for Nutter. Republican and Greater Northeast Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce president Al Taubenberger was recruited to face off against Nutter, but he readily admitted, “I’m running to make Michael Nutter a better mayor.”

When Nutter bested Taubenberger with 83 percent of the vote, the mayor-elect, surrounded by his supporters, took to the stage at his victory party and proclaimed, “It’s a new day. It’s a new day. It’s a new day. It’s a new day.”

Six-and-a-half years later, I asked Zack Stalberg, outgoing president of the Philadelphia-based ethics watchdog group Committee of Seventy, if Nutter has indeed ushered in a new day. “He’s run a cleaner government than Philadelphia has seen in a long time,” Stalberg says. “But he’s had a very difficult time getting anything done.”

In his nearly seven years in office, Nutter has created a Chief Integrity Office to clean up City Hall, appointed a federal prosecutor who busted corrupt city workers to head it and placed her office right next-door to his. He’s established Philly311, a call center where residents can obtain municipal services without having to be connected politically, which, in Philadelphia, was a revolutionary idea. He’s released reams of data that have elucidated the inner workings of city government.

He has also made good on his promise to stem gun violence: Last year, the number of homicides in Philadelphia dropped to a 46-year low (though it’s also worth noting that several cities around the country, such as Chicago and New York City, also saw historic drops).

But with only a year and a half left in his final term, Nutter has so far failed to achieve many of his established priorities, from aggressively cutting taxes to selling the city’s debt-laden gas company to rescuing its resource-starved school system. No doubt, the fact that the economy was sucked into a black hole at the beginning of his first term hasn’t helped matters. “He came in with a much broader agenda, but I think a lot of that agenda just became impossible,” says Comcast Executive Vice President David L. Cohen, who was chief-of-staff to Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell during the 1990s. “By dint of circumstance, he ended up talking more about ethics and integrity than he would have had the rest of his agenda been viable.”

Many of Nutter’s defeats, however, have been attributed to his own personality traits, in particular his apparent distaste for schmoozing and deal-making.

It makes some wonder: Is it possible for Philadelphia government to be honest and effective? We’ve had plenty of successful and corrupt politicians (two of our best policy brokers, former Pennsylvania State Senator Vince Fumo and Pennsylvania State Representative John Perzel, were sent to jail over corruption charges). But all too few Philly politicians have proven they’ve got what it takes to be powerful and squeaky-clean. So far, Nutter is not one of them.

Take Philadelphia Gas Works. Selling the city-owned utility, which until recently was the center of numerous corruption scandals, is exactly the sort of thing that Nutter was brought into office to do. Proceeds from the sale would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the city’s ailing pension fund, as retirement benefits eat up more and more of the municipal budget each year.

In March, Nutter announced that a Connecticut-based firm would buy the city’s gas company for nearly $2 billion. As long as the Democratically controlled City Council agreed, that is. If lawmakers don’t sign onto the sale by July 15, the firm can walk away from the deal.

Days away from the deadline, not a single councilperson has introduced Nutter’s bill to sell the utility. Stalberg, who was the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News for two decades before becoming an ethics watchdog, says this is shocking: “In my 40 years of watching this town, this is the first time I remember a mayor being unable to get a bill introduced.”

But under Nutter, this is somehow the norm. City lawmakers have stymied his reform agenda at every turn: They’ve refused to introduce a pension reform bill that he supports. They twice killed his proposed soda tax to fund the cash-strapped city government and even-more-cash-strapped schools. They shrugged off his call to give up their taxpayer-financed cars. Council has overridden so many of Nutter’s vetoes that one member even said publicly that he was “nostalgic” for the days when mayors won once in a while: “I had a bill once in here that passed 16-nothing,” Councilman James Kenney recalled at a voting session earlier this year. “But Mayor Street at the time, he sent it back disapproved, and on the override effort, I lost 10-6. … You got to work the veto.”

Nutter’s critics (and many supporters, for that matter) say he is ineffective because he is a profoundly bad politician. They say he has refused to acknowledge the realities of politics in Philadelphia, where you must dole out favors and occasionally yank them away in order to push through legislation. “I wish it weren’t that way,” Stalberg says. “It’s very primitive, but you have to be willing to use very primitive tools in order to succeed.”

Ed Rendell, who has been lauded as one of the most masterful Philadelphia mayors in history, described the crude way things get done here in the book A Prayer for the City: “A good portion of my job is spent on my knees, sucking people off to keep them happy.”

Nutter operates quite differently. According to City Hall insiders, he insists that legislators should sign off on his ideas simply because they’re “the right thing to do”—a holier-than-thou attitude that doesn’t jibe with people who who, above all, want to be re-elected. It also doesn’t help that he has resorted to publicly shaming City Council, such as when he called them out in his 2009 budget address about their taxpayer-funded cars.

Kenney, who has known Nutter since they went to high school in Philadelphia together, says if the mayor really wanted lawmakers to hand over their keys, he should have discussed it with them privately. Kenney was an early ally of Nutter’s, but that changed after he says he realized that he was getting nothing in return for carrying Nutter’s water.

“You call them, not for yourself necessarily, but for constituents, and they don’t seem to really want to be helpful,” he says, about the Nutter administration. “Politics is retail, and they’re the least retail politicians I’ve ever seen.”

Mark McDonald, the mayor’s press secretary, is reluctant to admit that Nutter and Council have an icy relationship, and he outright dismisses the notion that he lacks political prowess. “I would say that he is among the best in the business,” says McDonald. “He is a strategic thinker who knows how to find common ground and get results.”

One of the few places Nutter has made friends is in, strangely enough, the GOP-controlled state legislature. Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, a Republican who represents the suburbs just outside of Philadelphia, says Nutter’s ethical image has impressed GOP lawmakers from other parts of the state.

“Part of the complaint about Philadelphia was the corruption in government,” Pileggi says of his colleagues in Harrisburg. “The Mayor has been able to establish relationships with people from outside of the Philadelphia area, and portray Philadelphia in a very open, transparent way, and I think that has certainly helped his lobbying efforts on behalf of the city.”

But, the truth is, it hasn’t gotten him much. Nutter has long called for the state to provide more funding to the city’s perpetually broke schools, but many remain without libraries, full-time nurses or counselors. When he attended an editorial board meeting at the Philadelphia public radio station where I work last year, Nutter described a deal cut by state lawmakers to fund the schools, which was widely criticized as inadequate: “There’s not a person sitting at this table who was in negotiation on what came out of the legislative process. None of us were in a room anywhere with anyone.” In other words, Nutter more or less admitted that he isn’t the best at sausage-making. He almost seemed resigned to the fact that he had been shut out of the process.

We could have seen this coming, had we been looking closely for the signs back in 2007. Despite his shiny record, not a single one of Nutter’s former City Council colleagues endorsed him. Even more telling, he once told a reporter he still felt guilty about horse-trading years earlier to push through legislation to create a Police Advisory Commission, even though he won both that and the item he gave up (a same-sex benefits bill) in the end.

It is, of course, possible to be both honest and effective in Philadelphia; it’s just that you still have to be willing to play the political game. And in this one-party town, that quality is awfully rare among elected officials. With the exception of Rendell, there are no good examples of double-threat politicians in Philadelphia’s recent history. The lineup of rumored 2015 mayoral candidates includes only a couple folks who are halfway decent at brokering deals or acting ethically, but none excel at both. All, on the other hand, are entirely predictable pols—2015 is shaping up to look a lot like 2007, but without a good-government dreamboat like Nutter in the mix.

But this time, the voters have changed too. When I spoke to Ben Stango, the 25-year-old board member of Young Involved Philadelphia, a civic engagement group, he couldn’t have sounded more different than Hannah Miller, the young woman who enthusiastically declared in 2006 she loved Nutter because he would always make the “right” choice.

“He’s a good guy, and I think he’s gone about these things for the right reasons,” says Stango of Nutter. “I just think that if you look at the record, there are not a lot of big wins for the city.”

He hopes the next mayor has a vision similar to Nutter’s. But to see it actualized, he’s fine with a little Rendell-style ego-stroking.

There is one thing he will not accept: “If you can’t do it, then we don’t want to hear that.”

Holly Otterbein covers Philadelphia for WHYY and NewsWorks.org. Follow her at @hollyotterbein.